Experts in Environmental Compliance
Enventure technologies are undisputed experts in all areas of environmental compliance. By engaging our outstanding professional services, you can ensure that your products meet environmental compliance statutes such as RoHS, WEEE and REACH in the markets of the European Union and requirements such as China RoHS, Korea RoHS and Japan J-MOSS, which are the equivalent industrial standards in the Asian marketplaces. Whether you are involved in PCB design or any other area, Enventure Environmental compliance management systems will ensure that your finished product meets all relevant certifications, compliances and legal requirements for any worldwide market. Compliance is a very stringent and potentially complex process, as each and every component used in the manufacture of any particular products must be properly assessed in order to ascertain whether it meets the particular environmental compliance requirements for each relevant product market. Thus, evidence on the material composition of each component must be meticulously collected, collated, and consolidated for each manufacturer and for each and every product. This may seem like a daunting task, but Enventure can organise each step of the process in order to make sure that you can declare your product environmentally compliant with supreme confidence. We will guarantee that you achieve compliant status with no associated stress, significantly reduce the cost of achieving total environmental compliance, ensure global compliance for all products, achieve comprehensive coverage of all parts, including custom and mechanical, seamlessly and smoothly integrate with any compliance management system, gain access to reporting services in industry compliance standards and use our bespoke three way information collection techniques throughout the entire process, which combine internet resources, active sourcing and in-house expertise, thus ensuring secure, legitimate and expert guidance at every step of the process.
Understanding the ELV Directive 2000/53/EC
We seem to spend a lot of time talking about EU directives as they apply to environmental compliance and mechanical engineering. Whilst we realize that these are not the most exciting of topics we do hope our short summary articles are useful and at least raise awareness of these important issues. Today we are looking at the ELV directive and ELV compliance. These fit roughly into the scope of the RoHS directive and WEEE compliance directives but they cover End-of-Life Vehicles. Basically the wording says that the End of Life Vehicles (ELV) Directive 2000/53/EC requires that certain automotive products and parts be free (except for possible trace impurities) of mercury, cadmium and lead as of the 1st of July, 2003. There is an exception in that Lead can still be used as an alloying additive in copper, steel and aluminum and in solders. The ELV directive also sets recovery targets for the recycling of vehicles and components within the vehicles and strongly encourages designers, mechanical engineers and manufacturers to design their products with the ideas of later reuse or recycling in mind. They also ask that you provide dismantling and treatment instructions to people who may be involved in the dismantling and recycling operations to help them. If you think that you may be designing or building products that will be covered by the ELV directive then it is vital that you consult an expert on this issue who will be able to advise you about your actual duty of care in testing, and all of the paperwork and documentation that you will require to be properly ELV compliant.
What is RoHS All About?
RoHS Compliance, or more accurately EU Directive 2002/95 covering the Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations 2008 (the “RoHS Regulations”) is hard enough to pronounce (people tend to spell it out or opt for Ross, Roz or even sometimes, Rose) let alone to understand, so we thought we would try and sum up why it exists and why you should take notice of it in a couple of short paragraphs. Basically, what happens with EU directives is that they are passed for Europe as a whole and each member state has to implement the directive within its own laws. This law went live in July 2006 and anything made after this time must follow these environmental compliance laws. The topics covered in this directive are quite wide-ranging, for example, six hazardous substances have to be removed from all electrical and electronic equipment. These are Cadmium (Cd), hexavalent Chromium (CR VI), Lead (Pb), Mercury (Hg), polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE). The directives also enforce recycling and safe disposal of old equipment that you have sold, these take-back schemes enforcing a duty of care upon the manufacturer and sometimes the distributor to either dispose of the item or to re-use parts. In Europe this comes under the WEEE Compliance Scheme which we cover elsewhere. Many other countries (such as the US, and China) are implementing their own version of RoHS and WEEE ,so even if you manufacture and ship outside the EU it would be well to at least learn the guidelines and stick with them as much as possible not only for the sake of the environment but also for your future ability to market products just about anywhere in the world.
Do You Need to Worry about WEEE Compliance?
In this entry, we thought we would look briefly at the European Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (or conveniently WEEE compliance) and why this environmental compliance directive may apply to you. WEEE is there to try and encourage the collection, recycling and recovery of all or parts of waste electronic or electrical apparatus. This is an EU directive which is implemented slightly differently by the various member nations, but in general if you are dealing in large or small household appliances, IT and telecoms equipment, consumer equipment, lighting equipment, electrical (and electronic) tools, electrical toys, leisure or sport equipment, medical devices, monitoring and control instruments and automatic dispensing machines then this recycling directive will apply to you. There are exceptions for things like implanted (or infected) equipment, large scale industrial tools that don’t ever move, military products, automotive and aerospace or aircraft products or the oddly described “surface transportation products”. If your company does manufacture anything that comes into the list of covered products then you need to register as a WEEE producer and you need to provide people who buy your products a means of returning the old items to you for recycling. You also need to make sure you are very open about how you are doing this recycling and cover all the costs associated with this. One of the easiest ways of doing this, and for most companies this would be the most convenient is to employ an external company who specialize in all the things associated with WEEE Compliance. They will also be able to advise you on your responsibilities and liabilities so it is worth chatting to one at the very least.